Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 35 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

1. Neanderthals were in fact a highly intelligent race and they could be recreated through modern medicine.

2. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?

3. Recreating Neanderthals would benefit mankind. Neanderthals might think differently than we do. We know that they had a larger cranial size. They could even be more intelligent than us.

4. When the time comes to deal with an epidemic or getting off the planet or whatever, it’s conceivable that their way of thinking could be beneficial.

5.They could maybe even create a new neo-Neanderthal culture and become a political force. The main goal is to increase diversity. The one thing that is bad for society is low diversity.

6. This is true for culture or evolution, for species and also for whole societies. If you become a monoculture, you are at great risk of perishing.

7. Therefore the recreation of Neanderthals would be mainly a question of societal risk avoidance.’

Popular opinions on bringing Neanderthals back to life:

1. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should…

2. Why would anyone do this, what sort of life would that child have? Unnecessary.

3. This is wrong on so many levels !

4. Another fruitcake out of touch with reality . Surely there are more pressing concerns to be addressed

5. Playing with nature…

6. Did he not get the moral of Jurassic Park – don’t mess with nature. As fascinating as it would be to meet another species of hominid, they went extinct for a reason. Beside, this child would be brought up by H. sapiens, nurture would trump nature in personality traits therefore the main scientific gains would be from physical study which we can get from bones anyway – would be interesting to see speech capabilities and vocal range.

7. Disgusting, what would this child be treated as, human or animal to be owned, observed and experimented on? Genetic scientists have lost sight of a moral compass.

8. Plenty around where I live, professor I invite you to come and observe their behaviours.

9. How cruel. If a baby was born like that, he or she would undergo a lifetime of painful experiments and testing and would be treated like some sort of laboratory experiment. It’s a terrible thing to try to do, and any woman who agreed to take part in such an experiment would be a lowlife.

10. Maybe we should cure cancer first? No doubt the man is brilliant, but his goals seem a bit misguided.

11. Larger skull size, no woman would volunteer to push that out!

12. He’ll have no problem finding a womb for hire, esp if he pays well. But the innocent sounding reasons for doing this ‘they think differently and may help us with our problems’ are weak and lame. Do they really think we’ll fall for that? The real agenda may be much more sinister but will never be revealed.

13. There is a reason they are extinct. I believe this to be unethical, tinkering with nature and evolution in this manner is unlikely to end well. The planet is already overcrowded so it is unwise to introduce an extinct competing species to us. Just because you CAN, it doesn’t mean that you SHOULD. The risks outweigh the benefits at this time.

14. Who is going to raise the child, the mother or the scientist ??

15. But what kind of tragic life would that man lead? He would be an experiment. It’s inhuman to create life just for observation

16. The poor child would have a very lonely existence, spending its entire life as a scientific experiment and being constantly gawked at like an animal in a zoo. That scientist is a very selfish man.

17. Don’t be screwing with nature, Doc. The human species is bad enough as it is, without creating a mutant. Playing God is like playing with fire.

18. How disgusting, to deliberately have a child that will never lead a normal life. Will it live in a cage in a lab ?. Anyway as others have pointed out there are still plenty about if you look round the town. Dolly the sheep didn’t last long.

19. So wrong! I thought it was all about evolution, not going back. It’s not April Fool’s yet, is it, or have I missed something?

20. Sounds awfully like the start of horror movie to me…..

21. I’m all for cloning to be used, for example, to grow single organs, or even to reintroduce a species that we caused to become extinct, and that is needed to maintain an environmental balance. But cloning an intelligent, self-aware being that would be the only one of its species is simply immoral.

22. This is not a good idea, to bring about the birth of a child from an extinct branch of man would be cruel, on its own in our world with no-one of its own race to turn to when its troubled, it would be a prisoner, a lab rat, why not bring back T Rex?, at least it could EAT its tormentors.

23. Primitive man lived in the primitive world, and thats where he should stay.

24. This guy is truly as mad as Frankenstein.

25. Omg, please tell me this is a joke?

Not many people want to bring Neanderthals back to life. My opinion on the return of the Neanderthals is, if a woman agrees to give birth to a Neanderthal baby, then why not? It will be Homo sapien’s one of the best scientific achievements if Neanderthals are successfully recreated. I am curious to see the success of the experiment. 100,000 years ago, we shared this planet with several other species of human, all of them clever, resourceful and excellent hunters, but we Homo sapiens only survive. Scientists say, ‘one of the crucial elements of Homo sapiens’ adaptations is that it combines complex planning, developed in the front of the brain, with language and the ability to spread new ideas from one individual to another’. The Neanderthals died out about 30,000 years ago not only because the Ice Age limited available food supplies, but because Homo sapiens killed them off. Bats, bears, bees, birds, butterflies, buffaloes share their world with many other species of bats, bears, bees, birds, butterflies, buffaloes. Why should humans be afraid to have another species of humans? Just because we can, I think we should. Life without challenges is boring.